On November 16-18, 2015, all Healthy Start grantees attended the 2015 Healthy Start Convention: Achieving Measurable Outcomes that Make a Difference for Women, Families, and Communities in Washington, DC.
The purpose of the Convention was to convene the Healthy Start grantee community to build momentum, garner synergy, and propel the Healthy Start initiative towards greater success in improving perinatal health outcomes by sharing best practices, building skills, and increasing knowledge for providing high-quality services to women and their families.
Materials from the Convention are available below.
Breastfeeding is a critical part of promoting quality services for Healthy Start clients. This three-part archived webinar series led by Ms. Cathy Carothers of Everymother, Inc. is now available for listening to at your leisure. The webinars cover the following:
Part I: The barriers to breastfeeding for parents and examples of open-ended questions for counseling women on breastfeeding. The value of “meeting a mother where she is” was shared.
Part II: Preparing moms for their hospital experiences.
Part III: Helping moms work breastfeeding into their lives.
The Community-Based Doula Program connects underserved pregnant women to other women in their communities who are specially trained as doulas to provide support during the critical times of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum/early parenting. The program is based on the power of peer-to-peer support. Because doulas are of and from the same community as their clients, they are able to understand language and cultural needs and create long-term links to support networks. Women in the program have been shown to have higher breastfeeding rates, lower C-section rates, and more positive mother-infant interaction. HealthConnect One can assist in developing these programs.
This Doula Program, targeted to low income pregnant women, provides free perinatal services, including community-based childbirth education classes, labor and delivery support, postpartum care, and instruction focusing on mom/baby attachment, extension of breastfeeding duration, and interconception care. Participants in the program have been shown to have a decreased infant mortality rate, reduced need for medical interventions during labor and delivery, and longer duration of breastfeeding their infants.
This webinar will provide an overview of the HUG Your Baby Program. It will also cover teaching strategies for boosting parent confidence, facilitating the parent-child relationship and promoting breastfeeding duration supported by literature. Opportunities to receive training and resources on the HUG Your Baby program will be shared.
Following this webinar, participants will be able to:
Provide an overview of the HUG Your Baby Program and how it can support Healthy Start grantees support parents in their programs
Find more information about HUG Your baby Training and resources
Guide to breastfeeding interventions that have been reviewed by the Cochrane Collaboration and published through the Cochrane Library, a comprehensive collection of up-to-date information on the effects of health care interventions.
This document provides guidance for public health professionals and others on how to select strategies to support breastfeeding mothers and increase breastfeeding rates. It offers the most relevant information on each type of strategy. Includes information that may be important to keep in mind during the planning, implementation, or evaluation phases of a strategy. Identifies specific activities for each strategy that public health professionals can take to implement strategies in specific settings, including communities, schools, child care facilities, work sites, and medical care facilities. Includes examples of programs that use the strategy as a way to support and increase breastfeeding.
The Touchpoints approach offers healthcare providers and early education professionals a framework to build better partnerships with families around mutual strengths-based caregiving and parent engagement, all of which benefit child outcomes. Rooted in child social, emotional and behavioral development, Touchpoints seeks to improve parent-provider relationships, improve provider relationships with each other, enhance parent-infant relationships, moderate parental stress, normalize parent’s perceptions of their child’s behavior, increase well-child care adherence, improve infant developmental outcomes, improve maternal mental health indicators, and encourage longer breastfeeding. A variety of professional tools, training activities and learning communities are offered for providers.
The Ten Steps are the broad framework that guide the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative. They were developed by a team of global experts and consist of evidence-based practices that have been shown to increase breastfeeding initiation and duration. Baby-Friendly® hospitals and birthing facilities must adhere to the Ten Steps to receive, and retain, a Baby-Friendly designation. This webpage lists the Ten Steps and the endorsing organizations and links to supporting resources for both hospitals and parents.
